


smoke & mirrors

by PunkHazard



Series: Kent [4]
Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Gen, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-11
Updated: 2019-05-11
Packaged: 2020-03-01 05:57:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18794353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PunkHazard/pseuds/PunkHazard
Summary: "Chalk," Kepler says, picking up the little white stick and turning it between his fingers."It's very special," Maxwell tells him. "They didn't take my department seriously when we asked for them at the Nash. The mathematics community calls it the Rolls-Royce of chalk.""Special chalk," Kepler repeats, very slowly. He keeps his expression neutral, knowing better than to laugh in her face.





	smoke & mirrors

It's only her second ever yearly review but Maxwell's sure that she knows the routine already. She comes into Kepler's office, listens politely as he reads Dr. Pryce's brisk assessment of her work, and signs the form. She was in and out in about three minutes the first time; Major Kepler has in common with her an appreciation for efficiency. 'Enjoying yourself?' he'd asked as she signed, and her emphatic _Yes_ marked the last time Kepler ever questioned her on whether or not she'd made the right decision in signing on with Goddard.

"Sir," she says as he takes back the form and tucks it into a folder marked with her name, "I have a request."

Kepler cocks one dark brow at her but he doesn't react much beyond that. She makes a lot of requests. "I think you've more than earned a favor," he says, having staked his reputation on her when he recruited her, "so spit it out."

Maxwell digs through the outer pocket of her lab coat, a few crumpled-up receipts spilling out of it before she shifts her attention to the inner pocket. She emerges triumphant and sets the object onto Kepler's desk with a muffled clatter before she pulls back and settles into an awkward parade rest. It doesn't come easily to her, and Kepler never demanded that she follow whatever military decorum he's so fond of, but Jacobi does it and she'd naturally tried to follow his example. 

The gesture hasn't earned her the same easy, playful dynamic Jacobi has with their boss as she'd hoped it would, but they have their very own brand of cautious respect to navigate and Maxwell isn't about to complain about that. 

"Chalk," he says, picking up the little white stick and turning it between his fingers.

"It's very special," Maxwell tells him. "They didn't take my department seriously when we asked for them at the Nash. The mathematics community calls it the Rolls-Royce of chalk."

"Special chalk," Kepler repeats, very slowly. He keeps his expression neutral, knowing better than to laugh in her face. 

"Yes. We need it to work at our full potential."

"Hagoromo?" he says, reading the word printed along the length of the chalk's body.

"Fulltouch," Maxwell says.

"Full... touch."

"The company that produces the Hagoromo Fulltouch shut down last week," she says at last. "I'm on my last box."

"And?"

Maxwell sets another piece of chalk on his desk. "This is the chalk that Goddard provides us."

"Do you have a problem with Goddard brand chalk?" he asks.

"Here," Maxwell says, whipping a portable chalkboard out from behind her and laying it squarely on Kepler's desk in front of him. "Try them both."

"Points for presentation," he says, clearly impressed enough at her foresight to find this entire performance amusing. He picks up the Goddard chalk, braces one corner of the board and writes in a sweeping, old-fashioned cursive: _Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made._ Then he sets down the chalk and blows dust off his fingers, eyes flickering to the smile just beginning to curve the corners of Maxwell's lips.

"What's that from?" 

"The Tempest."

"You have pretty handwriting," she tells him.

"I know."

"The other one?"

Kepler picks up the special chalk and presses its tip to the board. He makes sure to look her in the eye when he's done writing. _Fool: He's mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf._

"It does write smoother," he observes. "But I'm surprised you're still using chalkboard. You have the glass wall and markers, don't you?"

"It still helps to lay out my ideas in chalk, sir." Maxwell keeps her eyes on the blackboard, reading the words again and again. _You,_ she thinks, _or me?_ "My mentor at Cambridge used it. He used to have students bring it to him from Japan."

Kepler leans back in his seat, props his chin on the heel of his palm. "Okay."

"Okay?"

"Tools of the trade, right?"

Kepler knows better than anyone the importance of having the right tools for the job. He's frequently indulgent, always willing to hear her lay out her case in their downtime. If her childhood was spent in the care of ascetic zealots and her adolescence in the company of self-absorbed intellectuals desperate to take her under their wing, now she's under the command of a leader who insists on her independence and rewards her for audacity. 

"Thank you," Alana says, something warm taking root in her chest, "Major Kepler."

He dismisses her with a skewed, toothy grin. "Don't mention it, Dr. Maxwell."

* * *

Three days later, Maxwell sets an alarm on her phone for exactly 12:03. Kepler's nothing if not a man of routine, Maxwell's office the exact halfway point between his office and the Goddard cafeteria. If she's working on a project for him, he always pokes his head in to check on her on his way to lunch, occasionally invites her to brief him on her progress, but today she's the one that flags him down just outside the door. "Sir," she says, meeting his attentive look with a neutral smile of her own, "could you come in here for a second?"

"What do you need?"

"I was just-- I needed to-- I just wanted to ask." He follows Maxwell in, pausing beside her when she points to a pallet of boxes stacked to her height, nearly as wide as it is tall. "Why," she says, "is there an entire pallet of chalk in my office?"

"You asked for chalk," Kepler replies, pointedly gesturing to four columns of various colored chalk and then the remainder, all white. The whole thing is encased in a layer of plastic. "I got you chalk."

"I thought we were understood that I asked for... a _reasonable amount_ of chalk."

He grins. "Yeah."

"This is going to last me until I'm eighty," Alana tells him. "Chalkboards will be totally obsolete by the time I get through these."

"That _is_ the idea."

"I mean," she says after a moment, counting the number of boxes along each edge, then the height of the stack, "considering the rate at which I go through chalk, it'll last, almost to the day, until my eightieth birthday."

Kepler pins her with an expectant look. "And?"

" _How do you know how fast I go through chalk?_ "

"Who gets someone chalk without finding out how fast they're gonna go through it?" Considering the painstaking care he gives to mission planning, Maxwell internally acknowledges that he would definitely do some research before he started tracking down her chalk. "You know," Kepler continues, defensive now, "I twisted a lot of arms to find it for you. There's a whole Fulltouch black market dealing with these things." 

"I know."

"A black market of Fulltouches," he repeats, just for emphasis. "Do you know how hard it was to ask around about this with a straight face?"

Maxwell imagines some poor mathematician strapped to a chair in an interrogation room while Kepler questions them about Fulltouches and has to bite down on the inside of her cheek to suppress the hysterical grin threatening to break across her face. That he'd managed to track down an entire pallet in three days, while on some business trip to Hong Kong, is impressive even in the context of his impeccable track record. "I know, sir, and I appreciate it."

"Lifetime supply of chalk," he says, stern. "I expect to never be bothered about this again."

"Of course, Major." Alana stares for a moment longer at her chalk, shoving her hands in her pockets while Kepler patiently waits for her to tell him that she's finished with her questions. Never one to cooperate, she looks sideways at him. "Did you base the number on my median or mean weekly chalk usage?"

"The difference is negligible. You're pretty consistent." He turns to look at her face, taking in her now-irrepressible grin. "What?"

"Nothing." They both regard the pallet again. Maxwell folds her arms across her chest, hands at her elbows, wondering if Kepler might be some sort of computer scientist or AI specialist himself. He certainly processes information like a computer: receive directive, download information, integrate to database. Execute command. The fact that he's a brilliant tactician as well is just unfair icing on the cake. "It's just, you said lifetime supply. But I intend to live _way_ past my eightieth birthday."

"Well, by the time you retire, how much chalk you have won't be my problem."

"Because you'll be a hundred years old?"

He gives her a look, lips quirked at one corner, but there's a mischievous glint in his eyes. "Besides, I'm not sure it'll last until your retirement."

"What do you mean?"

He leans in, just far away enough not to set off her impulse to back away but close enough that his breath sweeps over the shell of her ear. "You and I both know," he murmurs, "that the moment I leave this room, you're gonna start selling these at a premium to your officemates."

"Sir, are you questioning my--"

"How else do you only have _one box_ left after stocking up on three years' worth the moment Hagoromo announced they were closing last week?" Upon learning of the existence of this chalk, he'd also immediately noted their ubiquitous presence throughout Goddard's R&D divisions. A cursory search turned up a rather large package addressed to Maxwell's office not so long ago. "Your foresight is commendable, Doctor. Your impulse control... not so much."

 _Goddamnit_. "How did you know about that."

"I talked to a _lot_ of nerds to find you your chalk."

Maxwell manages not to make a snide remark about how Kepler himself is just as much of a nerd, despite how well he hides it. "Did you have to get them at a markup?" she asks instead. "I was hoping they would be cheaper in bulk, but my usual suppliers jacked up their prices the moment the news came out."

"I tracked down a pallet that went missing in a Singaporean warehouse and bought the whole thing at cost." He ignores Maxwell's sigh, the _Of course you did_ she mumbles under her breath. "Saved a couple boxes for myself."

"You saved some?"

"In case I have to recruit another mathematician. Apparently, you're all very easy to bribe."

Maxwell briefly considers taking offense at the stereotype, but the truth of it stops her. Let some other scientist call him on it, one who isn't actually susceptible to cool robots and special chalk. "Do you think there are other lost pallets?" she asks instead.

"Probably."

"There's a business opportunity here, sir."

"Dr. Maxwell," he says, eyeballing her old canvas sneakers, "am I not paying you enough?" 

It's an entirely rhetorical question; Kepler knows exactly how much she's getting paid and also that it's more than anyone else in an already well-salaried department. Alana clasps her hands behind her back as he takes his leave, and she doesn't miss the small, private smile on his face or the exasperated roll of his eyes.

* * *

Jacobi's raiding her office for snacks a week later, opening and closing a series of lockers and metal cabinets in search of a pack of pizza-flavored Combos he swears he'd left a month ago. Maxwell ignores him, in the midst of soldering pins onto a fairly complex circuit board. He's close to giving up, complaining loudly about how often Maxwell eats _his_ food, so she might as well keep some around for him when he has to drop into _her_ office. 

He's struggling with the last cabinet door when Maxwell looks up from her work. She doesn't have a chance to warn him before he finally wrenches it open and a torrent of boxes spills out of the cabinet, several of them bouncing off his face before they clatter to the floor, forming a haphazard pile around his feet.

"Oh," Maxwell says belatedly, "be careful?"

Jacobi, to his credit, is stony-faced when he looks at her, brows raised. 

"The original producer shut down a while ago," Alana explains. "I had to stock up."

"I haven't seen anyone use chalk since I slept through Non-Euclidean Practical Applications," Jacobi comments after a second, bending down to pick up the mess and return the boxes to their cabinet. "This is a lot of chalk." 

Joining him by the cabinet, Maxwell crouches down, picking up boxes and passing them to Jacobi as he replaces them. "Major Kepler tracked down an entire pallet."

"You gotta use the requisition forms, Alana."

"The requisition forms take _a week_ to process."

"That's why you gotta think a _week_ ahead." Slotting the last of the chalk into place, Daniel shakes his head, smiling. "I went to Kepler for barium nitrate my first month here," he says with a laugh, "and I forgot to say I needed _four hundred grams_ of it, so he left an entire barrel in my office. I'm not even an eighth of the way through."

"Lesson learned." 

"You're telling me. Wanna grab lunch?"

Maxwell checks the time on her phone, allowing Jacobi to throw an arm across her shoulders as they leave her office. "Yeah. Think I saw falafel on the menu?"

"You know what else is on the menu?" he quips. "I heard from a reliable source that Goddard's buying up some of your chalk company's old equipment. Sounds like Cutter wants to expand the Theoretical Mathematics department."

 _Well,_ Alana thinks, _that would explain it._ Getting caught up on the chicken-and-egg paradox of Kepler's motives always leads to a headache, so Maxwell decides not to bother. She has her chalk; Kepler went out of his way to get it for her. That'll have to be enough.

**Author's Note:**

> this is the only thing i could think about after reading [this article](https://gizmodo.com/why-mathematicians-are-hoarding-this-special-type-of-ja-1711008881)


End file.
